


wherein shadows creep

by mickleborger



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: The Black City, The Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 03:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4772660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Veil is so thin in Kirkwall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wherein shadows creep

There is a child sitting on stone steps, pressed politely against the carved marble so as to let the magisters pass.  In her hands she has a thin strip of cloth, discarded by her mother who in spite of her magic still likes to work with her hands, and who found this scrap of yellow inadequate.  It's very thin, this yellow thing; she thought to put it in her hair until you discovered the way it vibrates in the air, almost singing in the wind.  She likes the sound, so she stretches it taut and thinks that if she turns it blue it might almost remind her of the lyrium she has seen dwarves carrying (saw, once, from afar, along the road on the way to visit her cousins, heading for the Vimmark; her mother said they must be lost, partial to their stone as they are and loath to see the sky).  She keeps stretching it, holding it above her head so the sun can shine through as if a lighthouse on the shores of the realm of the gods.

The analogy is indelicate, and as this miserable bunch of threads starts to nick and tear in places the girl cannot yet see, the sun beats all the way down through the dust of the town and onto streets which have no cobbles for fear of blood going sour, trapped too deep in the grooves to come out.  Footprints trample over each other dully in the grime, the shine shines dully through the smog, the people whisper dully through their hands.  In a place not so far below a child with rich dark hair and a proud violet dress and eyes a yelllow even brighter than the exhausted bit of fabric in her hand is a world flat and beige and quiet, its vivid red turned to pale sad brown, its immaculate white withered to passionless grey, its voices muffled in that constant fear that hollow and erases as any feeling left out too long does.  Under the sun and the eyes of the overseers, terror in Kirkwall is cottonous.

But the sun sets and overseers sleep and children go home, and in the night echo the screams of the dreamers: this one about the lash, that one about a long curved knife.  This one curled in the corner like the statues before the Gallows, wishing to be cold and hard as them.  That one dreams of violent red on equally but differently violent blue, all turned white in foam.  Another yet dreams of green long forgotten by waking memory; and one more sleeping fitfully, hands still full of the warmth of another's shoulders, ears still ringing with stifled cries and snapping bones and dragon-sounds.  She had not wished to push him, but she had wished far less to be in front of him...

Kirkwall is silent by day, but its streets in the dream-world are livid with wailing.

The Fade is often referred to as a thing above the world, but it is below and all around as well; in truth, to describe it would be to describe the space between heartbeats and lovers' fingers, the gloss between strands of hair and the sigh that comes with every tramp of booted heel.  To talk of it would be to talk of all the little moments where consciousness fails and something else comes in to fill the empty space.  The Fade is as a shadow on the wall you see from the corner of your eye, shadow cast by another city in a time separated only by that fleeting moment of blackness after a sneeze - bloodless and brilliant, still and numb.  The Fade is the anger you feel before you voice it and the valor you know before you name it as such; and the Fade is also the fear left to ferment under your cot, and every howl you have kept from crossing your lips.  The Fade is a place without names and without faces, where even you are featureless and waifish, determined only by what you perceive; where, amid tears that never fallen now fly and laughter which never sounded now rings, a wind which is not wind flows over and past you.

It flows towards the City in the distance.

There are spires in this City, and domes, and towers.  Alone of all the things in the Fade which seem in flux this City stands, proud and solid.  First of all things in the Fade which can only be seen on the periphery the City is always there, tapping at the back of your skull when you do not look and snapping back to attention when you do.  In your line of sight its towers are straight and its roofs look almost lined with whatever equivalents to pigeons the Fade has, all still; but in the sidelong glance that catches a shadow at the window in the dark hours of the night it is a breathing, moving thing that turns to watch you leave, to watch you duck away from its gaze (it has no gaze, you confirm every time you summon the courage to look at it; but when relaxed you turn away...), to watch you try with your fleshless arms and boneless fingers to fight your way out of this air which seems more like gauze suddenly.  Impassive.  Patient.  You hear a singing as the breeze which on the hardest days seems tinged with red trickles past you towards the great golden cathedral in the distance where it knows it belongs.

Golden - and in her bedchamber a little mage sleeps with a torn little cloth on her nightstand, far from the sun which knows it to be yellow, turned by the gentle moonlight to black.  She is in the Fade, too, this little mage: she has built herself a garden of many colored sleeves, some of them with spots, some of them with stripes.  She has mounted them in rows on sticks and planted them in dirt which is not dirt and asked them nicely to blossom, and thinks of the day that even under the sun - golden, also - she will make a garden of singing flowers.  It should not be so hard, she thinks.  If she looks down through the ground she can almost see herself sleeping in dapples of black and grey, so thin is the Veil.  She sees her ribbon and thinks of the wind that made it sing, and thinks that maybe this Fade-wind and Fade-song come from the Veil.  She will ask her mother tomorrow.

There are scavengers in the Fade, little things which also see sleepers through the Veil and which scratch at the images before them, unable to do damage but hearing anguish and fury and despair and desiring them.  They are empty, these little things, and more surely nameless than even you who have only forgotten yours for the moment (for safety, no doubt; the little things want names, too, and where else would they get them?).  They are too empty to feel disappointment, but still they seek to fill their void.  The lucky ones sometimes do.  The rest watch the bright notes of thoughts and emotion slip through their misshapen hands, their amorphous claws, and clamber onto the wind that throws itself towards the City - always the City, the amalgam of all colors that somehow dreamers in their romances tell themselves is golden like the sun (and in fact just as colorless as the sun).  The City, which Kirkwall feeds well and loyally.  The City that calls and waits, its doors wide open, though no one should ever reach them (it is only vertically that it can be accessed, the City, and with enough force that it sighs in contentment and lets slip the bolts on its cellar doors).  The City that leers, and even more so once living breath has tickled its banners.  The City that laughs to itself and continues gorging, continues calling in sing-song as deep below the rock the Old Gods also do in their dreams (and where go the dreams of gods?).

(Ironic that the first call to be answered will be that of the lord of silence.  Perhaps in entreaty.)


End file.
